Hey, it's Shelby and Paul here.

Today we're in First Kings 13 through 15.

And Paul, it is troubling times.

There is unrest.

There is division.

We're now following two different kingdoms.

We're kind of entering a new phase in the book,

or a new section in the book of first kings. So it's really going to take us all the way through

Second Kings. So can you give us just some general guidelines for how we can read these sections

that feel like we're rapidly going back and forth between kingdoms and talking through

multiple kings in one chapter? Yeah. so we kind of get this format for the kings, and we alternate between descriptions

in northern kings and southern kings. And with each one, they have usually a date, a length,

and the location of the reign, and a theological appraisal, basically

whether or not they were a good king or a bad king, according to Deuteronomy and the law.

And then for the southern kings, occasionally we'll get this comment about whether they

followed in the footsteps of David or not, essentially to say whether they were good like David

was or not. And spoiler alert,

most of them are bad. And actually, in the Northern Kingdom, all of them are bad. None of them are

said to have obeyed the Lord. We get a few good ones in the Southern Kingdom, some pretty

notable good ones, actually, that we'll talk

about much later. But today, we're getting a number of kings from both kingdoms, and we focus

mainly on Jeroboam, Rehoboam, and their next two descendants. And just for a reading comprehension

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